Europeans did not inherit pale skin from Neanderthals – “By analysing the genomes of 50 people with European ancestry and 70 people with sub-Saharan African ancestry, Beleza’s team could estimate when the three genes – and pale skin – first became widespread in European populations. The result suggested that the three genes associated with paler skin swept through the European population only 11,000 to 19,000 years ago.”

Inside the Cold, Calculating Libertarian Mind – “[W]hen libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use ‘cold’ calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed ‘effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks’ more than others do. The researchers found that libertarians had the most ‘masculine’ psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine….”

Arab Autumn? – “The Arab Spring, eighteen months on. Has a passion for freedom of speech, separation of religion and State, and the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ seized the Arab world?” – @those who can see.

Mystery of Britain’s ‘Franken-mummies’ – “Two 3,000-year-old human skeletons dug up in the Outer Hebrides have been found to be a jigsaw of at least six different people who died hundreds of years apart.”

i’m still mad as h*ll about this. incensed is the word, although that doesn’t describe it by half.

and what’s really bothering me is that this scandal — the sexual abuse of underage white girls by pakistani men in rotherham, and the subsequent and presumably ongoing cover up of that abuse by politicians, the police and social services, and obviously now the media — doesn’t seem to be much of a scandal in the british media. the press over there seem more concerned with one girl who ran off with her school teacher (he’s white) than the hundreds (or potentially thousands) of abused girls who were overlooked by too many in authority whose job it was to help such girls. right now there’s something like 1250 stories about the runaway couple on google.co.uk news, whereas i count ca. 90 stories about the rotherham scandal. unbelievable.

“Town where girls were betrayed — first by groomers, then by the police”

“More than 200 confidential documents seen by The Times offer damning evidence of an institutional failure to tackle an epidemic of organised sexual exploitation in Rotherham.

“Similar crime networks have flourished during the past ten years across the North and Midlands, from Bradford, Birmingham and Blackburn to Derby, Manchester and Rochdale.

“A common pattern was that the men turning the abuse of young teenage girls into a collective activity were predominantly from a small sub-section of British Pakistani society….

“As long ago as 1996, a social services investigation uncovered concerns that girls were being coerced into ‘child prostitution’ by a small group of men who regularly collected them from residential care homes. Two years later, 70 girls from the town were said to be involved.

“The findings led to a one-year, Home-Office funded research project on the ‘detection, investigation and prosecution of offenders involved in sexual exploitation in Rotherham’….

“The project’s report was never published. It included ten case studies, all of them white British girls, and found that the men linked to the majority of the girls were members of one Asian family‘. [“asian” here means south asian. – h.chick] …

“There was ‘a great deal of data concerning the activities of these men’ yet none was charged with any sex offence. The report was written ten years ago. It should have acted as a wake-up call but for the next seven years nothing changed….

“Groups of young and older men, most of Pakistani heritage but also Iraqi Kurds and Kosovans, were operating in different areas of the town, known to police and social services yet seemingly immune from prosecution….

“A few miles away in Sheffield, South Yorkshire Police launched an investigation in 2007 into a network of Iraqi men aged 20 to 45 who were targeting girls in residential care. The youngest victim was 12. Convictions, prison sentences and deportations followed. [as they should have! – h.chick] An internal police report noted: ‘The offenders were well organised. Girls were approached and groomed by the men, coming to think of them as boyfriends.

“‘Once relationships were cemented, the situation changed. The offenders used violence to control the girls, who were then trafficked around the country, forced to have sex with other Iraqi men and used as prostitutes….’

“A July 2010 independent review for Rotherham’s safeguarding children board, which was not made public, described the Operation Central offences as ‘child exploitation at the top end of seriousness….’

“It was a hard-hitting report in all but one respect. Issues of ethnicity and culture remained taboo.

“‘Although the alleged perpetrators are of Asian origin and the victims are white, this is the factuality of these cases alone; nothing more can be drawn from that. It is imperative that suggestions/allusions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided. These assertions are without foundation.’ In reality, ten years of case files and intelligence reports had built the most solid of foundations for such an assertion.

“Within six months, a confidential internal report from South Yorkshire Police’s intelligence bureau, Child Sexual Exploitation — A strategic Problem Profile, gave further evidence of an escalating crisis….

“As of late 2010, up to 300 children were actively being sexually exploited in the country. Because most suffered ‘multiple criminal offences’, the force was ‘in all likelihood looking at the number of offences resulting from CSE [child sexual exploitation] reaching the thousands each year’….

“On the thorny issue of ethnicity, the report’s message was stark. ‘Practitioners throughout the force state there is a problem with networks of Asian offenders both locally and nationally. This was particularly stressed in Sheffield, and even more so in Rotherham where there appears to be a significant problem with networks of Asian males exploiting young white females. Doncaster reported a similar problem with Iraqi Kurd offenders, as did Sheffield.’

“Victims were ‘almost exclusively white or black’, with ‘very few’ Asian girls identified. ‘Work should be undertaken to explore why Asian and Iraqi males are over-represented as offenders,’ the report recommended.”
_____

some examples of the abuse and the lack of help by the authorities:

“Police went to a house outside which a father was demanding the release of his daughter, who was inside with a group of British Pakistani adults. Officers found the girl, 14, who had been drugged, under a bed. The father and his daughter were arrested for racial harassment and assault respectively. Police left, leaving three men at the house with two more girls….

“One young girl was doused in petrol as a threat against reporting sexual offences….

“Girls in Leeds also know the main perpetrators. They start grooming girls as young as 12 and are pimping them by age 13 or 14. Rape, multiple rapes and gang rape are often part of the grooming process. They have been operating for years. People in the community are too frightened to speak out. They do not talk about them within their own cultural community….

“One girl, 15, spent days in hospital after a broken bottle was allegedly forced inside her by two young British Pakistani men in a park, causing her to bleed extensively…..

“A 13-year-old girl was found at 3am with disrupted clothing in a house with a large group of Asian men who had fed her vodka. A neighbour reported the girl’s screams. Police arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly but did not question the men….

“A specialist project’s intelligence report for police identified 61 girls — 59 white, two Asian — linked to sexual exploitation by three brothers from another British Pakistani family. It named 41 associates of the brothers who allegedly used girls for sex….

“[O]ne young white girl, known by social services to have been sexually abused by Asian men from the age of 12, was offered language lessons in Urdu and Punjabi by Rotherham council. The aim was ‘to engage’ her in education….”

these data cover whites in france only. i’m pretty sure that doesn’t include north africans (berbers/arabs from algeria, for instance) because literally just a couple of the white respondents said they were muslims. so these data should really represent mostly ethnic french folks, with maybe some other europeans thrown in here and there. unlike in the post for spain, the samples sizes for all the (NUTS) regions of france were 50+. the pale yellow highlights indicate the region that had the highest score for a particular question (click on charts for LARGER views):

here’s a map of the average civicness scores for each region. note that, while the color scheme here is the same one i used on the map of spain, the scale is different. for instance, the least civic region in france (paris) is more civic than the most civic region in spain (catalonia):

the first thing to notice is that the civicness scores for ethnic french folks are lower than those of the anglo world across the board — often a lot lower. the french scores are lower than those of great britain (which i haven’t broken down by region/ethnicity yet — you’re next, g.b.!) — and, except for membership in a sport/recreation organization, lower than those for white americans. for example, in 2006, 17.10% of white americans said they were active members of a political party, while only 2.60% of whites in france said so.

the most civic region of france — “paris east” (captainpicardy, champagne-ardenne, and burgundy) — apart from being something of a lowland region, also appears to have been a part of early medieval austrasia. the population of this area is, therefore, likely, due to the “invention” of manorialism in this region, to have had one of the longest histories of outbreeding/nuclear family structures in nw europe. (however, as charles donahue has shown, during the medieval period, the people of this region practiced arranged marriages much more often than in england during the same time period, so marriage wasn’t quite as “free” historically in this region as amongst the english.)

the least civic region of france is paris — but, of course, paris is a thoroughly multi-cultural city, and so its residents probably suffer from putnam’s lack of trust [opens pdf] that arises naturally in diverse societies.

the next least civic region of france is nord-pas-de-calais which is also multi-cultural in its own way being comprised historically of both french and flemish speakers. (there are also, apparently, a lot of other europeans, and more recent immigrants from africa/latin america, living in the region.) again, diversity does not normally make for civic societies.

it might also be that the french flemings, like their distant neighbors/cousins(?) the frisians, had a longer history of inbreeding than other populations in northern france. i’m not sure about that since i don’t have any mating info on the french flemings — and i don’t know, either, what sort of territory they traditionally occupied (was it swampy like the frisians? and did they, therefore, miss out on manorialism like the frisians?).

oh — and remember how french canadians don’t seem to be very civic or trusting/charitable compared to anglo-canadians? well, isn’t it interesting that the same holds true for french people in france vs. anglos? and remember where in france most of the ancestors of french canadians hailed from? — the area outlined in red on this map? that is smack in the middle of a slightly upland, not-so-very civic region in france today: “paris west” at 8.93%.

“the other” is a shapeless concept in anthropology/the social sciences which i never quite understood — prolly ’cause the anthropologists/social scientists don’t understand it themselves. it’s got something to do with how we react to people who are unlike ourselves somehow or in some way … different headdresses or tattoos or taste in music … or something like that. it might’ve been a useful concept if they’d looked at it from the p.o.v. of genetics, but they mostly didn’t so … never mind….

anyway.

in light of the scandals in rotherham, i thought i’d take some time out from the regularly scheduled program to present a couple of very vague ideas i have related to sex and genetic relatedness between individuals/groups. i haven’t really thought through these ideas, so they’re very vague. don’t say i didn’t warn you. (also, could be that actual scientists have already thought through/done lots of research on all of these already and i’m not aware of it. if so, just ignore me.)

vague thought number one:

if the prime directive is to reproduce your genes (or at least those that would have an effect in this case) as much as possible, one tactic in achieving that goal might be to reduce how much your competitors — those individuals unrelated to you who don’t share your genes — manage to reproduce their genes. you could do that by a) killing them, and/or b) preventing them from reproducing in some other way.

one way to prevent “the other” guys from reproducing (so much) would be to mate as much as possible with, if you imagine two neighboring tribes, their usual mates. then, not only do you reduce the actual reproduction of “the other” guys’ genes, you also increase your own and spread your genes even that much further than you would’ve if you just stuck to the members of your own tribe. so it’s possible — possible — then that a special drive for mating with “the other” could’ve been something that was selected for ’cause it might’ve paid off.

however, you would think this would be a better strategy for men than for women since reproduction for human females is such a long, drawn-out, costly affair, whereas men can just spread their seed hither and thither without a care in the world. a drive for sex with “the other” might, then, be stronger in men than in women, and might even result in a certain amount of sexual coercion (to put it nicely) since the women don’t really want to engage in this sex with “the other” so much. and this coercion might be applied more often to unrelated/unlike females than to related/like females a la ghengis khan and his band of literal brothers sweeping across eurasia raping and pillaging wherever they went (that’d be one of the more extreme examples — extreme in terms of behaviors exhibited and in terms of success).
_____

vague thought number two:

in my world of inbred populations, familial altruism rules the day because it pays more — inclusive fitness-wise — to be altruistic towards your family members, since you share an inordinate number of genes with them compared to non-family members. perhaps, too, in an inbred society it would also pay more to mate with “the other” (as described above) if and when you could since, in an inbred society, the different extended families/clans are less related to one another than families in an outbred society. by mating with your unrelated neighbor’s sister, you’re (heh) screwing him genetically more than a guy in an outbred society would do to his neighbor. in other words, perhaps a stronger drive to mate with “the other” could be selected for in inbred societies because the effect of “vague thought number one” would be amplified. (perhaps this is why peoples in the arab world/middle east cover their women up in burkas — for their own protection just like they often say!)
_____

vague thought number three:

glenn daniel wilson has suggested that rape is/was a reproductive strategy of — i guess the gameboyz would call them beta males — guys who didn’t have access to females ’cause some alpha males had all or most of the access. maybe, then, the drive to rape is a response to polygamy. maybe. if so, that would certainly seem to fit the arab world and might explain why they are overly protective of their women (burkas, purdah). might even explain what happened in rotherham. i have to admit, i’m not 100% convinced by this one. i think it might be part of the explanation, but not the sole one.
_____

vague thought number four:

i’ve been meaning to do a post on this, but just haven’t gotten around to it, so i’ll just tack it on here. sex drives and the hajnal line — something which jayman mentioned in the comments here.

you’ve probably all seen henry harpending and greg cochran’s recent (very cool!) discussions about fathers’ ages and mutation rates (most recent example here). my question, wrt the late marriage trend in western europe for both men and women, is: has there been any selection for behaviors related to these late marriages?

if — if — over the last few hundred years, those nw europeans who married (i.e. mated) at a later age were more successful at leaving their genes behind than those who married young, were certain behavioral traits related to this selected for? greater ability to delay gratification, for instance (in this case sexual gratification!)? relatively lower libido (“no sex, please, we’re british!” — see also monty python)? other traits i haven’t thought of?

like jayman said in his comment, in most of the world even today — and in many more parts up until very recently — a 14, 15, 16 year-old girl is/was considered very marriable/matable. maybe nw europeans feel that relatively less so. dunno.

“Confidential police reports and intelligence files that reveal a hidden truth about the sale and extensive use of English children for sex are exposed today.

“They show that for more than a decade organised groups of men were able to groom, pimp and traffic girls across the country with virtual impunity. Offenders were identified to police but not prosecuted.

“The Times has published several articles about a pattern of crimes across northern England and the Midlands involving groups of men, largely of Pakistani heritage, and the sexual abuse of white girls aged from 12 to 16.

“We can now reveal evidence from more than 200 restricted-access documents, which show that, in one area, police and child protection agencies have held extensive knowledge of this crime model for ten years, yet have never publicly acknowledged its existence.

“The internal police and social service correspondence, research papers, intelligence reports and case files are a detailed history of alleged child sexual exploitation in South Yorkshire since 2000, focusing on Rotherham. They include a confidential 2010 report by the police intelligence bureaus warning that thousands of such crimes were committed in the country each year.

“It contains explosive details about the men responsible for the most serious, co-ordinated abuse. ‘Possibly the most shocking threat is the existence of substantial and organised offender networks that groom and exploit victims on a worrying scale,’ the report says. ‘Practitioners throughout the force state there is a problem with networks of Asian offenders both locally and nationally. This was particularly stressed in Sheffield and even more so in Rotherham, where there appears to be a significant problem with networks of Asian males exploiting young white females.’ Such groups are said to have trafficked South Yorkshire child victims ‘to many other cities, including Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford and Dover’.

“Another confidential 2000 report, for the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board, noted that such crimes had ‘cultural characteristics … which are locally sensitive in terms of diversity’.

“It said: ‘There are sensitivities of ethnicity with potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships. Great care will be taken in drafting … this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham’s qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided.'”

they also don’t trust other people very much. whereas 35% of americans feel that most people can be trusted, only 12% of hispanics think so. and that includes just 13% of hispanics who were born and raised here but have immigrant parents (pew’s “second generation” hispanics):

and hispanics luuuuuv big government. even 3rd+ generation hispanics prefer big government much more than your average american (58% vs. 41%). no wonder big government loves them:

by “backing up” i mean “cut-and-paste,” which means the links don’t appear in the backup post. but i’ve got them in the blog backup files — so if you really want a link from an old open thread comment, just ask. (^_^)